Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/334

whether an union with a single person and for life, is adapted to the nature of man, even if it was entered into originally only from love. But how far are we removed from a condition in which society would be in need of such an investigation! Before we can proceed to the solution of the extremely anthropological problem as to whether an human being can love but once, and whether his mating instinct ought only to be exercised upon one single individual of the opposite sex, it must first of all be settled that love should be the antecedent of marriage and that the official bond must result from a mutual attraction of both parties, existing at least at the moment in which it is imposed. But the present economic organization of society is in direct opposition to such a state of affairs. As long as man is not sure of always finding work to do and by it securing an acceptable competency, he will seek to promote his material interests by marriage or, if he can not accomplish this, he will avoid it and prefer the gross gratifications which prostitution offers him or else temporary liaisons which impose little or no responsibility upon him. And as long as woman is constrained to look upon matrimony as the only career and means of support open to her, she will rush into it without asking about love, and as a consequence be either fearfully unhappy or else become a moral wreck. The miserable lot to which these conditions condemn woman in particular, is not improved nor changed by the quacks who recommend the emancipation of woman as a cure for this severest of the diseases of society. I will not enter upon a searching criticism of this theory of woman's emancipation, only remarking in a few words that the struggle for existence would assume phases even more ghastly than at present, if both sexes stood upon the same plane of equality. If woman should become the serious rival of man in many